Post-Darwinist

This blog provides stories that Denyse O'Leary, a Toronto-based journalist, has found to be of interest, as she covers the growing intelligent design controversy. It supports her book By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg 2004). Does the universe - and do life forms - show evidence of intelligent design? If so, Carl Sagan was wrong and so is Richard Dawkins. Now what?

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Sunday, April 13, 2008

Expelled! Time Magazine recipe for life on Earth: Stir and cook real slow

In "Ben Stein Dukes it out with Darwin," Time's Jeffrey Kluger provides yet another reason for thinking that the legacy mainstream media are, well, toast. He announces,

The man made famous by Ferris Bueller, however, quickly wades into waters far too deep for him. He makes all the usual mistakes nonscientists make whenever they try to take down evolution, asking, for example, how something as complex as a living cell could havepossibly arisen whole from the earth's primordial soup. The answer is it couldn't--and it didn't. Organic chemicals needed eons of stirring and slow cooking before they could produce compounds that could begin to lead to a living thing.

Huh? Stirring and slow cooking? Look, I am not making this up.

Every serious origin of life (OOL) researcher finds OOL an excruciatingly difficult problem. Genome mapper and Nobelist Francis Crick, a staunch atheist, suggested that life must have been brought here by intelligent aliens, and Richard Dawkins is willing to entertain that idea too. But science writer Jeffrey Kluger somehow knows the "answer" that eludes all those guys?

Toward the end, Kluger concedes

In fairness to Stein, his opponents have hardly covered themselves in glory. Evolutionary biologists and social commentators have lately taken to answering the claims of intelligent-design boosters not with clear-eyed scientific empiricism but with sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism,

an approach Kluger deplores.

And Jeffrey, why do you suppose they have lately taken to that? Why would they prefer "sneering, finger-in-the-eye atheism" to clear-eyed scientific empiricism - for example, providing convincing evidence that natural selection produces a vast quantity of new information in life forms?

Could it be because they don't have the evidence but they do have the atheism? Jathink?

Anyway, given recent wholesale attempts to suppress discussion of the problems with Darwinism and materialist theories in general, the ID guys are well past concern about the atheist circus. Kluger probably didn't notice the drive to restore intellectual freedom. Just as well, because you only need that if you have new ideas.